As the Orange took the trip down south to Louisville, Kentucky, they were looking to break a six-game conference road losing streak, and a trend that has been created under coach Adrian Autry. Coach Autry was 8-22 in road games since he took over as head coach of the Orange, and the story against the Cardinals was no different.
Syracuse dropped its record to 15-15, with a 77-62 defeat to Louisville, and it was a game where the Orange never stood a chance, because even though they may have outscored
the Cardinals in the second half, they only put up 21 points in the first half themselves.
Here are some of the takeaways:
You can’t tell when SU is facing a team without their best player
On Tuesday night, Louisville was without its best player, Maikel Brown Jr., who was missing the game due to an injury.
Brown has averaged over 18 points per game for the Cardinals this season and is a projected lottery pick in the upcoming NBA Draft.
When a team has an absence like that, just like when North Carolina came up to the Dome without Caleb Wilson, it does not feel like Syracuse adjusts its gameplan to account for that.
If tuning into the game casually last night, it may have been difficult to even tell that Louisville was missing its star, and that is just because its other players stepped up. Isaac McNeely, Ryan Conwell, Sananda Fru, and Aly Khalifa, among others, moved the ball well and got open looks even without their standout guard.
Louisville clearly demonstrated a stronger understanding of how to attack the Orange without their star player, while Syracuse seemed lost in figuring out how to defend against it.
This team has given up
Syracuse has not finished back-to-back seasons under .500 since the 1960’s, and one would think the team would want to show some fight this season to try and prevent the chance of having that happen this year, but that is not the case.
And the first half against Louisville showed that. The Orange put up 21 points, did not make a single three-pointer, and assisted on two baskets in the first 20 minutes.
These numbers aren’t just bad; they are staggeringly bad, and they show that the team does not really care when they are going out there.
As much as the Orange did show fight and life in the second half, it did not matter because of the hole they created for themselves, and the fact that once that hole was created after an 11-0 run for Louisville midway through the first, there was no belief that they could climb out of it.
You can’t build rosters with strictly transfers
Coach Autry’s philosophy has been to not recruit freshmen, but rather to try to pick up transfers that he believes are “college-ready” and let them go to work.
But as games continue to unfold over the course of this season, an underlying theme continues to shine bright, and that is the fact that this team does not play as a cohesive unit.
They don’t pass to the open man on offense, and they don’t have set plays that are run to try to build chemistry and create confusion for opposing teams.
It’s all iso ball, and it’s all hero ball, and that stems from the team being picked from all over the country rather than being brought up together here in Central New York.
